WHEN I read this week's report on the £22 million investment in the Girdwood Community Hub site, I thought I had time-travelled to over a decade ago, when the Hub was first being developed. 

The rhetoric from politicians is from exactly the same playbook as it was in 2012. Then, politicians assured us that North Belfast was ‘crying out’ for a Community Hub. At Girdwood’s opening, DUP and Sinn Féin politicians alike praised the ‘first-class leisure facilities’ on offer – and congratulated themselves on the ‘shared space’ that Girdwood provided.

With £11.7 million of EU PEACE III, Council and DSD funding, it was supposed to be North Belfast’s biggest peacebuilding and regeneration project.

So what happened? Why do we need to pump £22 million more into the site? Well – it isn’t because it is missing a swimming pool. Girdwood’s development process, from the very start, was mired in sectarian squabbling, territorial contest, and just plain ineffectual decision-making from those in power. And its legacy – of sectarian and racist attacks around the site, of a social housing and mental health crisis in North Belfast – is evidence of politicians’ failure to lead. 

What the neighbourhoods around the Girdwood site really needed, then and now, was social housing. But they also could have benefited from genuine, targeted engagement with community need – the need for mental health support, or employment and educational opportunities, for example. Instead, the initial Girdwood Hub Masterplan was a product of political deal-making, a carve-up between the DUP and Sinn Féin. At no point were the communities around the Girdwood site involved in the process. It is totally unsurprising, then, that this most recent decision on Girdwood was made behind closed doors as well. 

If only politicians would support the kind of innovative regeneration work going on in other spaces in Belfast. The Take Back the City (TBTC) campaign, for instance, happening around the Mackie’s site in West Belfast, is a community-led response to Belfast’s housing crisis. TBTC has proposed creative and inclusive solutions to the redevelopment of public land, including addressing critical housing need. Yet politicians refuse to engage with their work, just as they did at Girdwood.

I often hear people in Belfast define insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ Instead of pumping £22 million into a swimming pool and playing fields, politicians ought to take a close look at themselves and at why the Girdwood redevelopment didn’t work in the first place. £22 million is not going to fix the fact that the Girdwood Hub development is built not on a desire for shared space, but on tit-for-tat political tradeoff.

Elizabeth DeYoung is a Research Scientist at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Power, Politics and Territory in the ‘New Northern Ireland’, the first book about the Girdwood Barracks site.

The book is now available in paperback or from community groups in North and West Belfast; or the author is happy to be contacted at edeyoung@upenn.edu